Reproducibility in PD-L1 Immunohistochemistry Quantification through the Tumor Proportion Score and the Combined Positive Score: Could Dual Immunostaining Help Pathologists?

Anaïs Mercier; Virginie Conan-Charlet; Isabelle Quintin-Roué; Laurent Doucet; Pascale Marcorelles; Arnaud Uguen

doi:10.3390/cancers15102768

Reproducibility in PD-L1 Immunohistochemistry Quantification through the Tumor Proportion Score and the Combined Positive Score: Could Dual Immunostaining Help Pathologists?

Cancers (Basel). 2023 May 16;15(10):2768. doi: 10.3390/cancers15102768.

Authors

Anaïs Mercier¹, Virginie Conan-Charlet¹, Isabelle Quintin-Roué¹, Laurent Doucet¹, Pascale Marcorelles¹, Arnaud Uguen^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ CHU de Brest, Service D'anatomie et Cytologie Pathologiques, F-29200 Brest, France.
² LBAI, UMR1227, Inserm, CHU de Brest, Univ Brest, F-29200 Brest, France.

Abstract

We studied the pathologists' agreements in quantifying PD-L1 expression through the tumor proportion score (TPS) and the combined positive score (CPS) using single PD-L1 immunohistochemistry (S-IHC) and double immunohistochemistry (D-IHC) combining PD-L1 staining and tumor cell markers. S-IHC and D-IHC were applied to 15 cancer samples to generate 60 digital IHC slides (30 whole slides images and 30 regions of interest of 1 mm²) for PD-L1 expression quantification using both TPS and CPS, twice by four pathologists. Agreements were estimated calculating intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC). Both S-IHC and D-IHC slides analyses resulted in excellent (for TPS, ICC > 0.9) to good (for CPS, ICC > 0.75) inter- and intra-pathologist agreements with slightly higher ICC with D-IHC than with S-IHC. S-IHC resulted in higher TPS and CPS than D-IHC (+5.6 and +6.1 mean differences, respectively). High reproducibility in the quantification of PD-L1 expression is attainable using S-IHC and D-IHC.

Keywords: CPS; PD-L1; TPS; immunohistochemisry; reproducibility.

Grants and funding

This research received no external funding.